Who is the author of Build It?

The authors of Build It are Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey.

Corporate Culture

Build It Book Summary - Build It Book explained in key points

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Build It summary

Name: Build It
Rating: 4.7 (52 reviews)
Author: Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey

Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey

The Rebel Playbook for World-Class Employee Engagement

4.7 (52 ratings)

35 mins

Brief summary

Build It by Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey is a management book that encourages leaders to focus on the needs of their employees and create a culture of trust, collaboration, and empowerment. It offers practical advice on how to build a more engaged and motivated workforce.

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Hiring Work Culture Promotion

Table of Contents

Build It
Summary of 13 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 13

What’s in it for me? Top tips to defeat drudgery and engage your employees.

What makes a bad job so unbearable? People often think it’s the pay, yet even the most lavishly compensated positions can be dull as dishwater.

The real killer is disengagement. Few things rival the dreariness that comes from a routine built around mindlessly clocking in, running down the minutes and waiting for the next paycheck to clear.

But that’s not just a problem for boredom-afflicted employees – it’s also bad for business. If you want your company to thrive in today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world, you need your workers to be switched on, enthusiastic and committed.

But, as Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey argue in Build It, there’s a problem. Too many companies pay lip service to the idea of an engaged and productive workforce without actually taking steps to achieve it. They continue to lie to their employees, treat them as adversaries and give them crappy jobs without autonomy or excitement.

That has to change. In this manifesto for a new world of work, they provide the blueprints for the Engagement Bridge™ – a radical new way of thinking about management, HR, employee satisfaction and getting the most out of your business.

In the following blinks, you’ll learn

why money matters but not in the ways people think;
what a difference a thoughtfully designed workplace can make; and
why businesses need to move beyond the old factory model.

If you want to get the most out of a business, you need your employees to feel engaged.

Have you ever had a job where the only thing you cared about was your paycheck? Or maybe you’ve been lucky and had a job you just couldn’t wait to start each morning?

That’s the difference between a disengaged and an engaged employee.

So what defines engagement? Well, the first thing to note is that it’s not the same thing as happiness.

All sorts of things might make an employee happy. Great pay, a nice office and next to no responsibility add up to a pretty comfortable gig, but they don’t mean that someone will be engaged with their work.

A truly engaged employee fits three criteria. First off, they understand and believe in the direction in which an organization is moving. Secondly, they can see how their role contributes to achieving that goal. Lastly, they’re genuinely invested in their employer’s success.

You can see why engagement is so important! It makes businesses stronger and more innovative.

That’s because engaged employees make better decisions. After all, they know what their company’s aims are and want to contribute to realizing them.

Take the British retailer Marks & Spencer. An internal study found that the stores with the highest employee engagement rates were twice as likely to receive the highest service rating. Staff absences, by contrast, were a whopping 25 percent lower.

Engagement is also becoming more vital as the world changes.

The pace of technological change today is breathtaking. In the early twentieth century, it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users. Facebook achieved that in a single year; Angry Birds needed just 35 days!

If companies want to keep up, they need engaged, adaptable workers striving for success. There are plenty of examples of businesses that didn’t achieve this – just think of the once mighty Blockbuster empire. It failed to adapt to the rise of online streaming. Today, it’s a mere ghost of its former self.

That leads to the million-dollar question: How do you cultivate a sense of engagement among employees?

In the following blinks, we’ll explore the authors’ brand-new trademarked model designed to do just that – the Engagement Bridge™.

The Engagement Bridge model identifies ten areas crucial to cultivating engagement.

Over a decade of research involving 2,000 companies provides the basis of Elliott and Corey’s Engagement Bridge™ concept. It’s tailor-made to help you create a more engaged and productive workforce.

The bridge has ten distinct components – seven “beams” and three supporting “rocks.” You don’t need every part to build a functional bridge, but the strongest constructions incorporate all ten elements.

Companies need to stop lying to their employees and embrace honesty and openness.

All the companies the authors looked at in their research made significant progress in one area – openness and honesty. Putting this first beam in place is vital to creating a productive working atmosphere. That’s because being honest with people is the best way to gain their trust.

A good place to start is by understanding just how widespread lying and mistrust are in many business practices.

If your business has a clearly defined purpose, your employees will be much more likely to engage.

Say you had to write an obituary for your company. How would you like it to be remembered? What mattered most to it, and what was your company trying to achieve? The answers to these questions make up the second beam – your purpose, mission and values.

Defining these clearly boosts employee productivity.

Don’t just tell people what your values are; put them into action and lead by example.

As we saw in an earlier blink, leadership is what you say while management is what you do. They’re both extremely important elements of the model, but they have to be correctly aligned if you want to build a strong bridge. So how do you slot them into place?

Well, you need to make sure that management is in tune with the values of the company. That’s essential to keeping employees on board.

Engaged leaders acting as role models make for engaged employees.

Things have changed in the workplace. In the old days, a boss was a boss; his word was final. Today, employees have a much more powerful voice. Top-down policies can be rejected from the bottom.

This shift in attitudes is reflected in the rise of websites like Glassdoor that allow workers to anonymously review their employers. More and more people are making use of these platforms – approximately 41 million people use Glassdoor every month!

Boosting engagement means ditching boring, joyless jobs that feed disengagement.

The production line model was created by the economist Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. He thought that employees shouldn’t be like artisans working on one thing from start to finish but more like individual parts in a larger machine.

But this kind of specialization meant that people stopped taking pleasure in their work. Smith argued that it didn’t matter because money would continue to provide a reliable incentive.

Work should be an opportunity for personal growth, so pay more attention to learning!

People and organizations thrive when employees are given the chance to learn and develop.

Luckily, that’s easier today than ever before. Companies have a vast array of technologies at their disposal to help teach their workers new skills.

Ditch impersonal “recognition” programs that don’t actually make people feel recognized at all.

When Elliott was working in a graduate job in the early 1990s, he designed a system that improved his team’s ability to handle administrative tasks. He was nominated for an innovation award and thanked in person by his boss. He felt flattered and pleased that his work had been recognized.

A year later, he received a gift card and an impersonal letter of recognition from a faceless, centralised HR department. That left a sour taste. The lateness suggested indifference. It would have been much better if his superiors had simply left it at the thank you.

Employees don’t just want money; they want to be valued and treated fairly.

In the previous blinks, we’ve explored the connecting beams of the Engagement Bridge. Now it’s time to turn to the supporting rocks. Let’s start with pay and benefits.

Throwing money at disengagement doesn’t solve the problem altogether. But it is an effective strategy to prevent your employees from becoming disengaged.

Flexible working conditions shouldn’t be a luxury but a standard.

When it comes to where we work, there’s an important difference between place and space. The second rock anchoring the Engagement Bridge is all about the latter. In other words, it’s about more than how an office looks – it’s the way employees interact with their virtual and physical environment that’s really important.

So what makes for a good working environment? Let’s start with agile working and technology.

If you want to get the best out of your employees, pay attention to their wellbeing!

A 2016 study found that the average worker took just four days of sick leave annually. Pretty good, right? Well, there’s a catch. Most employees claimed that they were too stressed or tired to concentrate fully on their work for an additional 57 days per year!

That makes well-being essential to productivity. This is the final part of the Engagement Bridge.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to engagement, so employ some basic principles and follow your gut!

Having looked at the basic building blocks of the Engagement Bridge, you might be wondering how to start putting all this information into action. In this final blink, we’ll draw the threads together and get you ready to start building engagement in your company.

Let’s start by looking at the basic principles.

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What is Build It about?

Build It (2018) takes a look at one of the most important yet overlooked secrets behind business success: employee engagement. Drawing on a decade of research into 2,000 companies, Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey explore the tactics of some of today’s best-known firms to shed light on how they keep their workers switched on and productive. One common theme? They all tore up the HR rulebook, and this path-breaking book is designed to help you do just that.

We’re thrilled to announce that the authors have worked together with Blinkist to create this book-in-blinks for you.

Build It Review

Build It (2018) is a book that explores the importance of creating a strong company culture and provides practical steps for building a thriving workplace. Here's why this book is worth reading:

It offers insightful strategies and tools for cultivating a positive and engaging work environment, resulting in higher employee satisfaction and productivity.
Backed by extensive research, the book provides evidence-based practices that have been proven to contribute to the success of organizations.
With its conversational tone and relatable examples, the book avoids being dry or intimidating and keeps readers invested and interested from start to finish.

Best quote from Build It

The greatest enemy of communication is the illusion that it has occurred.

—Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey

Who should read Build It?

CEO’s and entrepreneurs looking to improve their businesses
HR people looking to engage their employees
Managers wanting to improve the performance of their team

About the Author

Glenn Elliott is an award-winning entrepreneur, author and speaker as well as the founder of Reward Gateway, a leading employment engagement technology. Debra Corey is an author and speaker as well as a seasoned HR professional. She has over 30 years of board-level experience at companies including Gap, Quintiles and Merlin Entertainment. She currently works with Reward Gateway.

Categories with Build It

Corporate Culture

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